The End of the Day

by Claire North

[wyvernfriend]

complex, confusing and powerful This I've been reading on-an-off for a while, getting distracted by other books and going back.  It's a messy book, a book with some characters that you meet only for a while and then some that pop up over and over.  Plus there's overheard snippets presented as occasional chapters, like those conversations you half-hear in airports and coffee shops, the ones that distract you from what you're doing.  There are times that the book was a bit of a slog but overall I found it quite powerful.
 
Charlie works, through an office in Milton Keynes, for Death.  He is given assignments to meet people and give them something, usually a significant token.  Death will come to these people, as it comes to everyone.  Charlie has been in some hair-raising places and had to deal with people to try to negotiate with Death, some more forcefully than others but this books is more a meditation on life and death and how we need to carpe diem as hard as possible because some day we all will die.
 
Sometimes it got lost into the meditation but this is a book that by the end I was lost in. Not a book to read lightly.  It's a book that will linger for a long time in my head.
 
No-where do I have a space for it on my bingo card, it would fit into supernatural, Magical realism and Terrifying women.